In order to attract audience and effectively compete, editors of websites hosting online publications often apply a content strategy that addresses questions such as the following: What should we write about? How many articles should we publish per day? How should we allocate resources between competing stories? Which stories should we promote? In the context of online publishing, content strategy also typically involves search engine optimization (SEO), e.g., using keywords in online publications that will result in high rankings in search results returned by search engines.
Social media optimization (SMO) is similar to SEO, but, as its name implies, involves optimizing online publications so that they are more easily disseminated through social networking and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, bit.ly, etc.
Recently, social networking and social media websites have added social signals (e.g., Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, and bit.ly clicks) that allow users to socially express interest in content or share content with others. These websites have also exposed application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the tracking of social signals.
At the present time, there is a paucity of tools that use SMO or social signals to facilitate content-strategy decisions.